"Also on the bill was Pearl Jam, whom Kurt had been skewering in the press for months, although he jokingly denies there had ever been a full-blown feud. `No I just happened to express my feelings toward their music, that's all,' he says with a little smirk.

But it wasn't their music--Kurt felt that the band was a bunch of hypocritical sellouts. Two members of PJ--Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament--had been in Green River, the first band to put out a record on Sub Pop. Kurt's friend Mark Arm had quit the band and formed Mudhoney because he felt it was going in an overtly commercial direction, largely because of Ament, who was among the first early Sub Poppers to openly declare he wanted to be a professional musician.

`I know for a fact that at the very least, if not Stoney, then Jeff is a definite carrerist--a person who will kiss ass to make sure his band gets popular so he can become rich,' Kurt claims.

And Jeff Ament was also a jock, an all-state basketball player in his native Montana. `Jocks have completely taken over music,' carps Kurt. `That's all there is nowadays is muscular bicep Marky Mark clones. It's pretty scary. And just to get back at them I'm going to start playing basketball.'

Pearl Jam had assumed the look and some of the sound of `grunge rock,' or just enough to ride the commercial wave. It was a calculated--and hightly successful--attempt to dress up the same old corporate rock in tattered flannel shirts and Doc Martens boots. Also, the band's label spent enormous amounts of money in promoting a band with no indie-style grass-roots following--it was another case of major labels burying the indie rock revolution with money. This annoyed Kurt to no end. He began sniping at PJ in the press.

In the January 1992 issue of Musician magazine, Kurt had declared that the members of Pearl Jam were going to be `the ones responsible for this corporate , alternative, cock-rock fusion.' `I would love to be erased from my association with that band,' Kurt said of the band in the April 16 Rolling Stone cover story. `I do feel a duty to warn the kids about false music that's claiming to be underground or alternative. They're just jumping on the alternative bandwaggon.'

But by that time, he had decided to at least forgive Pearl Jam's fey but immensely likable singer, Eddie Vedder. `I later found out that Eddie basically found himself in this position,' says Kurt. `He never claimed to be anybody who supports any kind of punk ideals in the first place.'

Vedder was standing around the backstage area at the MTV Awards show when out of the blue, Courtney walked up to him and slow-danced with him as Eric Clapton played the elagaic `Tears in Heaven.' Kurt walked over and butted in. `I stared into his eyes and told him that I thought he was a respectable human,' Kurt says. `And I did tell him straight out that I still think his band sucks. I said "after watching you perform, I realized that you are a person that does have some passion." It's not a fully contrived thing. There are plenty of other more evil people out in the world than him and he doesn't deserve to be scapegoated like that.